Hado
Directed & Written by Rubi Rock
Starring Miguel Garces, Haizea Carneros, & Gonazalo Vega

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Just because the gays are married doesn’t mean they can’t still be messy, honey! In Rubi Rock’s Hado, a man heading home from his lover’s place gets a call from his partner and their daughter to wish him a happy birthday, but these seem to be the least of his worries. On the way, he hits something, or someone. You might think you know how this one’s going to play out, or you might think you can see a few steps ahead. But Hado is less about who the man hits and more about the twisted tendrils of fate that drew him there, as well as what it still has in store for him.

Rock’s short is surreal, dramatic, and, in the end, incredibly tragic. Hado tugs at the heartstrings, as the protagonist is clearly stepping out on his sweet little family just to get a little bit of younger ass, and there’s clearly a big part of him that knows just how badly he’s messing things up with his family. The ending is unexpected, though it’s also in line with the short’s overall theme of fate and destiny. And, perhaps, what the protagonist experiences is even closer to karma than fate. Hado‘s use of the Uncanny makes for an unsettling ride down a dark road where there’s little-to-no hope found.

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Saint Maria’s Way
Directed by Chris Turner
Screenplay by Chelsea Kania
Starring Isaura Barbé-Brown, Alina Allison, Morgan Archer, Rosanna Dean, Jack McEvoy, Davina Sitaram, & Joakim Skarli

Horror

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Chris Turner’s Saint Maria’s Way, penned by Chelsea Kania, is my number one favourite film at Fogfest 2024 because it brings together a number of elements, from the Gothic ghost to Britain’s surveillance culture with CCTV, to a potential history of both racist violence and police brutality intertwined. The film starts with a woman (Isaura Barbé-Brown) calling emergency services for help, reporting that a man’s been following her through the streets, but as a cop on the other end of the call tries to help her, he discovers not everything, even on the CCTV, is as it seems. Eventually, the tables turn: suddenly, it’s not the woman being stalked any longer, and for very good reason, it turns out.

“I’m lost. Everything’s black.”

The brilliance of Saint Maria’s Way is in how it tells a deeper story while not having to dump a ton of exposition on the viewer, suggesting things and trusting an audience to understand the bread crumbs, as well as where the crumbs are leading us. Even the final reveal of the supposed stalker man’s identity comes quick and fast, with only a few words: “He‘s one of us.” Without needing tons of dialogue to spell everything out neatly, Saint Maria’s Way brings up legacies of police brutality, racism, and, most certainly misogyny. This is a gothic tale of women’s redemption against men in power, most specifically men in power who are meant to protect but who often do the exact opposite.

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Valley of Souls
Directed by Edileuza Penha de Souza & Santiago Dellape
Screenplay by David Mattos, Edileuza Penha de Souza, & Santiago Dellape
Starring Luan Vinicius, Deusenir Santana, Romes Santos, Kaleo Henrique, & Doroty Marques

Horror / History

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Similar in a sense to Saint Maria’s Way, Edileuza Penha de Souza & Santiago Dellape’s Valley of Souls tackles racial legacies through horror, though this short does so via a far different lens and a distinctly Brazilian perspective. In this tale, a man called Bastião and his family attempt to return to their land but they’re haunted by the spirits and the history of the land. While Bastião tries to escape the past, the past will not let him or his family go.

There’s so much history packed into Valley of Souls. The word “Kalunga” is spoken, which refers to Brazilians descended from Maroons, the descendants of Africans in the Americas and Islands of the Indian Ocean who escaped enslavement to form their own settlements. As Bastião’s pulled back into the past, inhabiting the body of one of his ancestors, a man shouts: “There‘s no quilombo left for you to flee to, devil!”; a quilombo (from the Kimbundu word kilombo meaning ‘war camp’) is a Brazilian settlement founded by people of African origin, many of them Maroons. There’s certainly more to Valley of Souls that I, as a white Canadian, am not aware of, too. The whole short is full of history and spirituality, making this an unforgettable, powerful experience tinged with magical realism and horror alike.